I think the beginnings of religion in pre-civilized societies seem quite natural if you put yourself in their places. Their environment consisted of things that behave predictably, like a rock or spear flying through the air, or things that sit there and do nothing, and things that behave unpredictably, like their fellow human beings, animals (more or less), the weather, volcanoes, etc. As it happens, if you try to imagine what other people are thinking, or what they will think if you say or do this or that, that might just be the one area where people, or maybe not oneself, but the wise people in the group might achieve some mastery. The weather—well, we’re still working on that. If is in our nature, when we have mastery in one area and none in another, to hope to make find some analogies from the area we somewhat understand and apply them in the more mysterious area.
So, in these societies you have people explaining every unpredictable thing, and convincing themselves they’re actually understanding something about them—things like weather, disease, floods, droughts, etc, in terms of the volition of some sentient being visible or invisible. Religion goes through all sorts of transformations partly as a result of how the society evolves, and some people discover it is a way to get some control over others by claiming to be more knowledgeable about the mysterious things.
It’s really only in the last few hundred years that understanding of things in mechanistic terms finally accumulated enough to give (some) people confidence that maybe that was really the dominant paradigm, rather than the gods, witches, ghosts and other magical beings paradigm, and religion has millennia of entrenchment and institution building, and has come up with such ingenious lock-in clauses as “God will hate you and send you to hell if you don’t believe—believing certain things is labelled virtuous. The idea of trusting institutions of knowledge accumulation by experimentation, and choosing what to believe on the basis of “rational” procedures is still pretty new, and few people have gotten the hang of it. With most people, if they look to science very much for explanations, they are passively accepting what they were taught to do, and they’re very succeptable to falling into a belief/social system that makes them feel good in some way.
Yeah, that’s one common theory for the start of religious belief; basically, that we evolved a natural ability to both try and predict the future, and to predict what other people would do, and that religious thought and religious belief was a side effect of that, especially for dealing with unusual events that weren’t obviously predictable based on what people knew at the time. That’s quite possible.
What Eliezer was talking about is an entirely different theory; the theory that religious belief (or some genetic predisposition to religious belief) was actually itself something that was selected for by evolution; not as a side effect of some other trait, but as something that was directly selected for, something that gave individuals a fitness advantage.
I agree with him that the group selection argument doesn’t really seem to work here, I just don’t think that his theory (the “stone the heretic” hypothesis) makes sense either.
I think the beginnings of religion in pre-civilized societies seem quite natural if you put yourself in their places. Their environment consisted of things that behave predictably, like a rock or spear flying through the air, or things that sit there and do nothing, and things that behave unpredictably, like their fellow human beings, animals (more or less), the weather, volcanoes, etc. As it happens, if you try to imagine what other people are thinking, or what they will think if you say or do this or that, that might just be the one area where people, or maybe not oneself, but the wise people in the group might achieve some mastery. The weather—well, we’re still working on that. If is in our nature, when we have mastery in one area and none in another, to hope to make find some analogies from the area we somewhat understand and apply them in the more mysterious area.
So, in these societies you have people explaining every unpredictable thing, and convincing themselves they’re actually understanding something about them—things like weather, disease, floods, droughts, etc, in terms of the volition of some sentient being visible or invisible. Religion goes through all sorts of transformations partly as a result of how the society evolves, and some people discover it is a way to get some control over others by claiming to be more knowledgeable about the mysterious things.
It’s really only in the last few hundred years that understanding of things in mechanistic terms finally accumulated enough to give (some) people confidence that maybe that was really the dominant paradigm, rather than the gods, witches, ghosts and other magical beings paradigm, and religion has millennia of entrenchment and institution building, and has come up with such ingenious lock-in clauses as “God will hate you and send you to hell if you don’t believe—believing certain things is labelled virtuous. The idea of trusting institutions of knowledge accumulation by experimentation, and choosing what to believe on the basis of “rational” procedures is still pretty new, and few people have gotten the hang of it. With most people, if they look to science very much for explanations, they are passively accepting what they were taught to do, and they’re very succeptable to falling into a belief/social system that makes them feel good in some way.
Yeah, that’s one common theory for the start of religious belief; basically, that we evolved a natural ability to both try and predict the future, and to predict what other people would do, and that religious thought and religious belief was a side effect of that, especially for dealing with unusual events that weren’t obviously predictable based on what people knew at the time. That’s quite possible.
What Eliezer was talking about is an entirely different theory; the theory that religious belief (or some genetic predisposition to religious belief) was actually itself something that was selected for by evolution; not as a side effect of some other trait, but as something that was directly selected for, something that gave individuals a fitness advantage.
I agree with him that the group selection argument doesn’t really seem to work here, I just don’t think that his theory (the “stone the heretic” hypothesis) makes sense either.